The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag (19 page)

I followed
them outside. Billy said something about his car being just around the corner,
put his arm about the young man’s shoulder and led him away.

I
followed, stealthily.

They
wandered down Moby Dick Terrace, crossed the High Street and then turned into
Horseferry Lane.

And I
followed with further stealth.

They
were almost at the lock gates, where the Grand Union Canal meets the River
Thames, when the young man began to express his doubts. I ducked down behind a
dustbin and watched. There was something of a struggle, though rather
one-sided, and then Billy hit him. The young man went down and I watched from
hiding as Billy began to assemble some kind of electronic apparatus from pieces
he’d been carrying in various pockets. It looked almost like a 1950s ray gun to
me. Billy held the thing to the temple of the young man and squeezed the
trigger. The young man twitched horribly and then went limp. Billy dismantled
his ray gun and placed the parts back in his pockets. And then he lifted the
young man’s body, carried it to the river bank and dropped it into the water.
And then he turned, grinned and called, ‘Come out, then, I know you’re there.’

I was
all crouched down behind a dustbin and kept very still.

‘I know
you’re there,’ said Billy. ‘I know you followed us.’

I rose
as silently as I could amongst the shadows and prepared to take my leave at the
hurry up. And then something hit me very hard on top of the head.

I
turned and staggered and took- in the image of a beautiful woman with haunted
eyes, dressed in a chauffeur’s uniform. And then I found myself tumbling down
once more into that deep dark whirling pit of oblivion so beloved of the 1950s
American genre Private Eye.

And it
didn’t half hurt.

Sundown on Jim the Wooller

Jim the Wooller leaned a leather arm upon the bar.

‘One more for the road?’ said Musty Fuller.

‘I’ll take one, if one there be,

For there’s no-one alive but me,

And I’m the last of all men, Jim the Wooller.’

Jim the Wooller drained his road one to the dregs.

‘I thank you for that drink, my Musty Fuller,

It likes me fine, this Auckland Rum,

I drank some watching
Things to Come,

And realized that I’m the last of all men,

Jim the ‘Wooller.’

Jim the Wooller spat with haste into the cuspidor.

‘I must be going now, my Musty Fuller,

For I’ve no time to sleep,

Shearing thirty million sheep,

And it’s no fun at all to be

The last man,

Jim the Wooller.’

13

The
way to a man’s belief is through

confusion
and absurdity.

JACQUES
VALLEE

I awoke in some confusion,
feeling most absurd. It wasn’t the bopping on the head I objected to, it was
the manner of the bopping. Bopped by a dame! Woodbine would never have let
himself get bopped by a dame! Tricked by one, maybe, deceived by one, done
wrong by one, but never actually bopped on the head by one. The ignominy, the
shame.

But
then
I
wasn’t Woodbine.

In
fact, when it came right down to it, I had to confess I was really crap at
being ‘Woodbine. I hadn’t been in character at all when I got bopped on the
head. And I hadn’t been indulging in the usual banter with Barry either. I’d
really fouled up and I’d got my just deserts. I had no-one to blame but myself.

But
enough of self pity.

‘That
was your bloody fault, Barry,’ I said. ‘You could have warned me she was
coming. Call yourself a Holy Guardian Sprout?’

But
Barry did not reply.

‘Don’t
sulk,’ I told him. ‘Just admit that it was all your fault, and we’ll say no
more about it.’

But
Barry still did not reply.

‘All
right, then,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t
all
your fault. Most, but not
all.’

But
Barry— ‘Barry,’ I said. ‘Are you there?’

I shook
my head, and tapped at my temples.

‘Barry?
Barry?’ But he wasn’t there. I could feel he wasn’t there. My head felt, well,
empty, really.

‘Bloody
typical,’ I said. ‘Just like God, never around when you need him.’

I
struggled to my feet and rubbed at my head. But my head didn’t hurt. Inside or
outside. There was no bruising. I felt fine.

‘She
must have hit me with something really soft. Now where exactly am I?’ I had a
good old look around. I wasn’t in an alleyway, which I would have been had I
been playing Woodbine, but wherever I was, it looked far from familiar.

Because
it looked far from anywhere.

Absolutely
anywhere.

I was
standing upon an utterly flat surface. Like sheet ice, or clear plastic, or
something. And it just went off in every direction. And the sky— ‘Oh, shit!’ I
said. ‘The sky.’

The sky
was white. Paper white. I’d never seen a sky like that before. But then, was it
actually the sky? The harder I looked, the more uncertain I became. Perhaps it
wasn’t the sky, at all. Perhaps it was a ceiling. Perhaps I was inside some
vast modern building, with a white ceiling and a plastic floor. That had to be
it. But whatever it was, I had to be off.

For one
thing I had to call the police. I may have indulged in client confidentiality with
Billy’s mum regarding the boxed-up Inspector Kirby, but this was different. I
wasn’t in Billy’s pay, and that bastard had murdered someone. I’d actually
witnessed a real-life murder. And that was no laughing matter.

‘Where
is the exit?’ I asked myself.

‘I do
not know,’ I replied. But I set off to find out.

Now, I don’t know what
exactly was wrong with my wristwatch, but it had stopped working.

I was
most upset by this, because it was a really expensive wristwatch. A
Piaget.
An
image thing, I don’t want to dwell on it. But I will say this, you can always
tell a man by the quality of his wristwatch. The same way you can judge a woman’s
morals by her shoes. My dad could tell a woman’s age just by looking at her
knees. But sadly that was a skill he never passed on to me.

But I
digress. My watch had ceased to function, and although my legs were working
fine, they didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. How far had I walked? And,
when it came to that, was I walking
into
this place, or
out
of
it?

I was
lost all right, and that was a fact.

I
remembered being lost before. Once before. A long time before, when I was a
small boy. My dad had taken me to the British Museum to show me the shrunken
heads. We’d been walking through the Egyptian gallery, and I’d stopped to look
at a sarcophagus in a glass case. I was fascinated by all the hieroglyphics.
Row after vertical row. What did they mean and who had drawn them? Who were
these people who had once been living but now were so long dead? I asked my
dad, but he wasn’t there. I was all on my own in that long gallery. All alone
amongst the dead. And right there and right then I understood, for the first
time, the loneliness of death. It just hit me out of the blue and it hit me
very hard. The young are far from death, the young consider themselves
immortal. Aged aunties or grandparents die, but not the young, their time is
now. And my time was now. But I was here. Alone amongst the dead whose times.
were very long ago.

And I
grew afraid and I wept.

Wept as
I was weeping now.

Weeping
now? I wiped tears from my cheeks. I
was
weeping now. Why was I weeping?

And
where—?

I
looked all about me. I was no longer all alone in the middle of nowhere. I was
all alone in— The Egyptian gallery of the British Museum. And it was all
exactly as I remembered it. I was standing by the very case. The one with the
sarcophagus with the hieroglyphics. And the smell of the place and that certain
light, it was
exactly
how I remembered it.

And at
this I became
very
afraid.

‘Are
you all right, son? Lost your dad have you?’

I
looked up. And I remembered this man. He was the curator of the Egyptian
antiquities. It was he who had found me when I was a child. He who had taken me
by the hand and led me around until we found my dad.

‘Come
on,’ said the curator. ‘Let’s see where he is.

And he
reached out his hand.

‘No,’ I
said, backing away. ‘I’m not a child any more. I’m not here.’

And he
faded away. Right in front of my eyes. He faded away and was gone.

And so
too the Egyptian gallery.

And I
was all alone once more. All alone in the very middle of nowhere. And then it
dawned upon me. Because it was then that the loneliness of death closed in all
about me and then spread out in every direction.

And I
knew what had happened.

And why
I was here.

And I
knew why Barry wasn’t with me any more.

Because
his job was over. Because he only guarded the living.

And I
was no longer one of the living.

Billy
Barnes had killed me.

I was
dead.

Wandering in Deserts

Out of water,

Out of luck,

Curse the sun,

And curse the truck.

Curse the fabled pharaoh’s gold,

Curse that gearbox, ten years old,

Curse the greed of mortal man,

Curse the drive-shaft full of sand,

Curse the Fates that brought me here,

Curse the sodding second gear,

Wish I was home drinking beer.

Not wandering in deserts.

14

If you flick the words, the ideas will come into being.

JIM
CAMPBELL

I was dead.

And I
was angry.

Angry
at being dead. Furious at being dead and angry with the living. I remember as a
child having chickenpox. And that made me angry. Not angry about the pain or
the discomfort, but angry with everybody else. The well people, the people who
didn’t have chicken-pox. I would sit at my bedroom window and glare down at
them as they walked along the street. How dare they be well when I was ill. It
wasn’t fair and it made me angry.

As you
get older you get used to life not being fair. You take for granted that life
isn’t fair, and so you just do your best and try to get whatever you can out of
it. But you’re still angry, deep down inside, even if you can’t admit it to
yourself. You’re still angry.

Or at
least
I
was, anyway.

But now
I was dead I was really angry.

This
wasn’t just a view from a bedroom window, this was an overview of every living
person in the world. No matter how rich or how wretched. I was jealous and
angry with every single one of them. Because they were still living and I was
not.

But
none more so than Billy Barnes.

He was
responsible for my death. And he was the one who would pay.

‘I’ll
find him!’ I shouted. ‘And I’ll haunt him. I’ll haunt him until he dies, and
then I’ll meet with him face to face and kick his head in.’

The
thought of eternal revenge cheered me slightly, but then another thought
entered my head. If I
was
dead, then where was I? I wasn’t in hell, but
this sure as hell wasn’t heaven.

The
third and most obvious option had to be limbo. And if I was in limbo then it
meant that God hadn’t yet made up his mind about which way to send me. And if
that was the case, then it might be a. wise move to dispel all thoughts of anger
and revenge and concentrate more upon peace and tranquillity and things of
that nature.

Then I
could get up amongst the choirs celestial with the all but certain knowledge
that Billy Barnes would be getting his comeuppance in the furnaces below.

And that
thought cheered me up no end at all.

But I
hastily struck it from my mind. That was gloating over another’s impending
misfortune wasn’t it? And that was sinful, surely? God wouldn’t go for that
kind of thing. God only went for purity of thought.